Dylan Thomas Prize 2020: Jay Bernard, Stephen Sexton among shortlisted poets

The shortlist for the Swansea University Dylan Thomas Prize 2020 is out with young, experimental poets such as Jay Bernard and Mary Jean Chan among those competing for the £30,000 purse. The prize, which is one of United Kingdom’s most prestigious literary honours, recognises each year the achievements of writers and poets aged 39 or under in memory of the Swansea-born writer, Dylan Thomas to celebrate his life, his 39 years of creativity. The 2020 shortlist includes Bernard’s collection of poems Surge, which addresses the issue of black radical British history set against the backdrop of prominent incidences such as the Grenfell and Windrush scandals making his work particularly relevant in the prevalent socio-political climate. Also part of the shortlist is LGBTQ+ poet Chan’s Flèche which explores questions around multilingualism, queerness, psychoanalysis and cultural history. [caption id=“attachment_8236061” align=“alignnone” width=“825”]  Jay Bernard, Téa Obreht and Stephen Sexton are among the writers to have made it into the shortlist for the 2020 edition of the Dylan Thomas Prize. Image courtesy: Joshua Virasami (Jay Bernard); Ilan-Harel (Téa Obreht); Micheal Weir (Stephen Sexton)[/caption] Poet Stephen Sexton is also among the six writers shortlisted for the 15th-anniversary edition of the Dylan Thomas Prize for his work If All the World and Love were Young, a poem whose narrative takes the reader through the world of Super Mario World, in a beautiful intermingling of reality and the world of the video game. Other shortlisted works include Vietnamese-American poet and essayist Ocean Vuong’s On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous, Orange Prize-winning writer Téa Obreht’s novel, Inland, which describes what it is to have an American dream in the Wild West and writer Bryan Washington’s Lot, a collection of interlinked short stories set in his hometown of Houston. The jury for the 2020 edition has on its panel writers such as the 2011 winner of the Dylan Thomas Prize, Lucy Caldwell, co-director of the popular Jaipur Literature Festival, Namita Gokhale, British-Ghanaian writer, poet and journalist Bridget Minamore and poet and broadcaster Ian McMillan among others. The chair of judges, Swansea University’s Professor Dai Smith CBE, said of the shortlist, “The shortlist for 2020 ranges across the genres of poetry, short form fiction and the novel, and each work manages to address upfront the pressing social and personal concerns and dilemmas of our time. But what suddenly stands out in stark relief, amidst the overwhelming global nature of the crisis in which all humanity now finds itself struggling to cope, are the universal values which these disparate books highlight: compassion, empathy, courage against despair, anger against indifference, love in despite of everything.” The winner of the Swansea University’s Dylan Thomas Prize 2020 will be announced on 14 May.